PopCult Rudy Panucci on Pop Culture

The AIR Celebrates The Life Of Hal Prince

We pay tribute to Hal Prince, the legendary Broadway producer/director Wednesday afternoon on The AIR, with a new episode of Curtain Call.  You can listen at the website, or on this embedded radio player…

Befopre our tribute to Mr. Prince, at 2 PM on Beatles Blast, yours truly hosts the ninth part of our look at rare and unreleased music by The Beatles. For most of the summer, Beatles Blast will follow this format and bring you The Lost Beatles Project. This will be a treat for the die-hard fans as we mine the best of the recently-released archive projects by the band, and mix in rare releases and wild remixes from their band and solo years. We won’t be posting playlists for these shows because the whole point is that each of these programs will be a revelatory surprise.

Beatles Blast can be heard every Wednesday at 2 PM, with replays Thursday at 9 PM, Friday at 11 AM, Sunday at 5 PM and Tuesdays at 9 AM, exclusively on The AIR.

At 3 PM Mel Larch presents a new hour of great musical theater on Curtain Call.  This week Mel pays tribute to Hal Prince with highlights of the cast album of his final show, Prince of Broadway. The world of musical theatre lost a titan last week, with the passing of legendary director and producer Harold “Hal” Prince. Widely recognized as one of the most creative and innovative figures in 20th Century musical theatre, his career spanned more than five decades and included such shows as Cabaret, Candide, On The Twentieth Century, Evita, and The Phantom of The Opera. He was best known for his longtime collaboration with composer/lyricst, Stephen Sondheim on such groundbreaking shows as Company, Follies, and Sweeney Todd. Over the course of his career, he received a total of 21 Tony Awards, more than any other individual to date.

His last show, Prince of Broadway–which he also directed–was a musical retrospective of his career. The show premiered in Japan in 2015 and opened on Broadway in August, 2017.  This week’s Curtain Call presents highlights of this show as small sample of his impressive legacy.

After the new hour of Curtain Call, stick around for two additional episodes from the Curtain Call archives. Curtain Call can be heard Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM and 8 PM, Friday at 10 AM and Saturday at 6 PM. An all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight, and an additional marathon can be heard Sunday evenings from 6 PM to midnight..